There are a number of trends associated with the growth and use of the Internet. Services computing, most prominently enabled by the Web services platform is one such trend. For example, Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are increasingly being used to provide and use software as interoperable (Web) services over the Internet. However, a Web services-based SOA is a specific system, whose structures are based on interactions among individual (Web) services and their clients. Services computing to-date does not provide a grouping concept for heterogeneous services to build SOA based on units that are on a higher-level of abstraction than individual services.
Another major trend is related to the way that people use the Internet. Social communities and community platforms such as MySpace.com, Flickr.com, and YouTube.com attract very large numbers of individuals to share arbitrary content. From a technical viewpoint, community platforms are Web portals that provide basic functionality for the dissemination and aggregation of data in large-scale networks. Community practices center on the use of Web 2.0 technology that enables simple, more ad-hoc composition and content mash-ups, and documentation and content selection through less formal techniques such as social tagging and rating. In other words, such community platforms are highly flexible systems exploiting the power of people networks, but are usually limited to the dissemination and aggregation of data, but do not integrate (Web) services.
Communities can be used to disseminate and aggregate (heterogeneous) services; in doing so, groups of (heterogeneous) service are created. Unfortunately, this combination of Web services computing and community platforms has not been provided to-date.